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Attacks Hobbled Entire Net, Web Tracker Says
SAN MATEO, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 2000 FEB 11 (NB) -- It appears that this week's online denial-of-service attacks slowed traffic over the entire Internet by as much as 26 percent below normal transmission speeds - either directly as a result of the assaults, or for directly related reasons.
That's according to a company that tracks Internet usage at some of the Internet's 40 biggest sites.
Daniel Todd, director of public services at Keynote Systems Inc., said traffic on Wednesday - the day when Excite.com, ZDNet and E-Trade were all attacked - was stripped of one-quarter of its normal transmission capacity. Wednesday was also a day when suspicious incidents occurred at America Online and at the Microsoft Internet service provider MSN.com, but those now appear not to have been the direct result of malicious attacks, he said.
"We did see some errors at AOL and MSN," Todd said. "But based on what we saw in comparison to the rest of the Internet slowdown, they don't seem to be outside of the parameters." He said it remains possible that both services were attacked, he said, but if so they were "very successful in defending it." An AOL spokeswoman told Newsbytes Friday the company had verified it was not attacked.
Keynote measures Web site traffic 250 to 300 times an hour, from computer stations placed in networks around the world, Todd said. On Monday and Tuesday, the company noticed that Net performance was moderately worse - about 6 to 8 percent slower - than it had been on the Monday and Tuesday of the previous week, Todd said.
But on Wednesday, the Net's ability to transmit data was working at only three-quarters of the capacity it had one week before, he said.
By Thursday, the Net's performance was back to normal. "There were no confirmed attacks yesterday, and the Internet itself seemed to be functioning within normal parameters," Todd told Newsbytes today. "It wasn't as dramatically slowed down as it was on Wednesday, for example."
There are several reasons why the Net was so slow Wednesday, even though the attacks appeared to diminish that day in both frequency and severity from Tuesday, the height of the onslaught. "It could be that there were more attempts and that (sites') defenses were getting better," Todd said. "Another possibility is that there were just a whole lot of 'rubberneckers' out there, a lot of people who got on the Internet to check out the accident, or who were coming on to see what information was around."
There is no chance, he said, that the Internet slowdown was not related to the attacks, and spurned attacks or increased Web traffic by the curious are the two most likely causes of the crippled capacity. "It's definitely a phenomenon," Todd said.
Excite on Wednesday was knocked down to 40 percent of its usual capacity, an improvement over what happened after the Monday attack on Yahoo, a site that was knocked completely out of business for several hours. It is not clear from the Keynote data if sites like Excite, having been notified of previous attacks, put up better defenses. But that is possible, Todd said.
"E-Trade and Excite, neither site was ever completely unavailable," Todd said. "At no time were all of our computers unable to get through the traffic jam and get through to them. As time goes on, the general trend is for less and less severe incidents."
There are three possible reasons for the diminished might of the latest bombardments, Todd said. It might be better defenses at sites, or that preventative steps were taken. It might have been that the people doing the attacks were "bored" with them and that they were not coming as often.
Or there is one other possible reason. "Maybe they are still trying to attack, but as computers come up (infected), law officials and network operators are identifying and notifying true owners, and the attacks are losing horsepower. Or it could be a mix of all three."
Keynotes Systems Inc. is on the Web at http://www.keynote.com .
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com .
Kevin Featherly, a former managing editor at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, is a Minnesota journalist who covers politics and technology. He has authored or contributed to five previous books, Guide to Building a Newsroom Web Site (1998), The Wired Journalist (1999), Elements of Language (2001), Pop Music and the Press (2002) and Encyclopedia of New Media (2003). His byline has appeared in Editor & Publisher, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Online Journalism Review and Minnesota Law and Politics, among other publications. In 2000, he was a media coordinator for Web, White & Blue, the first online presidential debates.
Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly